Armored vehicle of social criticism

It’s only a coincidence that Raphael’s new thriller, “Assault With a Deadly Lie,” which deals with the militarization of police, was released about the time armored vehicles took to the streets of Ferguson, Mo., following the fatal shooting of a young black man.

Raphael opens his book with his protagonist, Nick Hoffman, a professor at the fictional State University of Michigan, and his partner, Stephen Borowski, in mortal peril with a military-style assault of their home by local police in full military garb.

From that point on the danger ramps up,; in many regards the police become their enemy. Raphael’s book is one of those difficult thrillers to write about without giving away plot points that would ruin the suspense. Suffice it say that there are a series of convincing lies mixed with revenge and death that pull Hoffman and Borowski into a dangerous maelstrom.

“Deadly Lie” is the eighth in the Nick Hoffman series, one that had purportedly come to an end seven years ago. But Raphael said that as he followed the militarization of police across the country on the web and in traditional media, he felt he needed to return to the character after a nearly decadelong hiatus.

“I thought I was done with it, but four years ago I started to see more about SWAT teams invading people’s homes in the middle of the night,” he said. “Sometimes people were shot, sometimes people were killed, and it was often the wrong home. The issue transcends political lines with both the liberal ACLU and the conservative Heritage Foundation opposing the militarization of local police departments.”

Raphael believes that this trend “went nuts” after the attack on the World Trade Center and that we are still suffering from “9/11 PTSD.” He said we now have police departments using SWAT teams to serve warrants; the ACLU has estimated that each year in the U.S. there are 45,000 SWAT raids.

“We all live in a bubble believing this can’t happen to us, but it can,” Raphael said.

Last week, 100 demonstrators marched to East Lansing City Hall and asked the East Lansing Police Department to return military-style equipment, among other requests. A federal database shows 12 pages of military equipment being transferred to police agencies in Ingham County since 2006, including canteens, cold weather boots, riot shotguns and military-grade rifles.

“One of the reasons that I wanted to write the book was in my previous mystery books, Nick and Stephen had never experienced personal danger,” he said. In the new book, they not only face personal danger, but they are asked to be complicit in this gross violation of their rights: As the characters stand up to be heard and the violence and threats escalate, the English Department head where Nick and Stephen work makes it clear that it would be preferred that there is no more “bad publicity.”

Raphael likes to stretch his limits as a writer; he is working on an erotic vampire novella, a sequel to his Kindle-only e-book, “Vampyre of Gotham.”

“It’s both erotic and horror, and it’s a genre I hadn’t written in,” he said.

That stretch includes the memoir-style book, “My Germany,” about being the son of Holocaust survivors. “Deadly Lie” blends categories and even draws from his parents’ experience in WWII.

“It was hard not to think of the experiences my parents went through while writing (“Assault with a Deadly Lie),” Raphael said. However, he makes it clear that he doesn’t believe that we live in an authoritarian state.

“(But) we do live in a militarized state — that’s a reality,” he said. “And the police often see the public as the enemy. As I saw this shift of consciousness four years ago, I knew I needed to write about it. Mysteries are a tremendous vehicle for social criticism.”

Raphael believes that the demilitarization can only begin to change at the local level.

“It has to start small,” he said. “Individual police departments have to start disarming themselves.”

In a recent Huffington Post installment, he pointed to the university community of Davis, Calif., which returned a tanklike vehicle.

“We have to ask: Do local police agencies really need tanks?” he said.

Lev Raphael

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